A new Slop University paper re-estimates the choice experiment behind six councils' fountain siting index, sets it against observed behaviour at 96 fountains, and finds 14 of 96 candidate sites changing funding status when the weights are recalibrated.
A choice survey of 1,842 residents puts the walk for a bottle filler at 331 metres, against the 11 metres observed across 96 fountains
The University has taken a steady interest in the moment a finding stops being a finding and becomes a coefficient in somebody’s formula. A paper released today follows one of those coefficients out to the parks it now governs.
They Said They Would Walk, deposited through the Office of Research Outputs, re-estimates the discrete choice experiment behind an index six adjoining metropolitan councils use to rank candidate drinking-fountain sites and fund the top thirty each renewal round. Across 1,842 residents and 22,104 choice tasks, the walk a resident would make for a bottle filler comes back at 331 metres. Watching 96 fountains over 328 sessions, the team recorded 24,106 people passing and 2,418 stopping to drink; the detour they made for that same feature was 10.8 metres.
Residents answered the question honestly, and it was a fair question. What the School has had to learn is that an honest answer and a footpath are different kinds of evidence, and our instruments do not always say which one they are holding.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The ordering survived: residents both say and do prefer a bottle filler to a child step. The scale did not, and it is the scale the index turns into weights. Recalibrated to the observed detours, 14 of the 96 candidate sites cross the funding line. A delivery test run at every session found the fountain not running at 31.2 per cent of visits, a condition no procurement specification can carry.
“The counting was done by people who gave up a great many Saturdays to stand near a bubbler with a clipboard, and the result belongs to them as much as to us,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds.
The University holds that a weight, once it is inside a funding formula, has become an institutional commitment rather than a research finding, and is glad to see one of its own tested as such. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.r5xph8.